Technological advances and the
social systems for dealing with them do not develop at the same pace. When
old social and cultural systems are applied to new ways of doing things,
the fit is sometimes awkward and even painful. The reaction to that pain
is a common theme in history. In England, early in the nineteenth century,
the Luddites tried to stop the economic dislocations resulting from labor-saving
machinery by destroying the machinery. At about the same time, the Erie
Canal Commission passed up a chance to build a railroad, for which the
technology was then available, to construct a waterway, whose concept was
more comfortably familiar.1
It should be no surprise to find that the same cultural lag that afflicted
the industrial revolution is also present in the information age. Precision
journalism will take some getting used to -- both by the practitioners
of journalism and by its customers.

In its early applications to
coverage of the political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s --
civil rights, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the youth counterculture
-- no paradigm shift seemed called for. The application of social and behavioral
science research methods was simply the extension of journalism by other
means. "The ground rules are no different from those on which we've always
operated," I admonished my fellow journalists in 1973. "Find the facts,
tell what they mean, and do it without wasting time. If there
are new tools to enable us to perform this task with greater power, accuracy,
and insight, then we should make the most of them."2

That
description suggests that precision journalism involves little more than
the maintenance of the journalist's traditional role with only a modest
quantitative improvement in speed and accuracy. When a quantitative change
reaches a certain magnitude, however, it becomes a qualitative change.
Some current objections to precision journalism are based on the assumption
that such a change in magnitude is taking place or is likely to take place
in the future. These objections are beginning to lead to proposals to regulate
the practice of precision journalism ñ either
directly by law, or indirectly by pressuring the media to adopt voluntary
self-restraint. The efforts by some state legislatures to ban exit polls
are one example. Another is found in the voluntary withholding of exit-poll
information by the networks until the voting is finished in the jurisdiction
in which the poll was taken. Pressure for other forms of restraint may
be building.

Privacy
concerns

The
notion that a journalist should be concerned with a possible invasion of
privacy may seem surprising and self-contradictory. Invasion of privacy
is almost part of the journalist's job description. However, there are
precedents for observing self-restraint in some circumstances. The codes
of some of the major professional associations in journalism recognize
a duty to provide protection of privacy. In the utilitarian ethical systems
used, consciously or not, by most journalists, the right to privacy is
easily overridden by a more pressing concern for the public's right to
know. The question for precision journalism is whether the power of its
methods adds a moral burden that did not exist for less powerful methods.

Elliot
Jaspin and Maria Miro Johnson's exposure of the criminal pasts of Rhode
Island school bus drivers is an example.3
That the named individuals were school bus drivers and that they had criminal
records were both matters of public information. At the Milwaukee Journal,
James Rowen linked public records of drunk driving
convictions with pilots' licenses for a story on aviation safety.4
Without the computer, neither reporter would ever have made the connection.
The quantitative change in the amount of time and effort to search and
link such records has led to a qualitative shift in the things that journalists
can discover.

Is
this extension of journalism by other means still journalism, or is it
something new and different that ought to be regulated? The regulators
have their eye on us. While the exercise of freedom of the press cannot
be regulated directly, barriers can be placed between the journalist and
the sources of information. A current theory of regulation that has yet
to be fully tested holds that a public document is public only if it is
on a piece of paper that can be read by a person. If the same information
is in a medium that can be read by a machine, it is not, this theory holds,
a public document --or at least
not the same kind of public document and subject to the same kinds of rules.

The
theory is novel and not generally accepted. Lawyers and judges like to
reason by analogy, and the analogy between a paper record and an electronic
database is easy to understand. But some government agencies have begun
to claim a substantive difference between the two kinds of records. When
the Boston Globe asked for computerized Treasury Department records
for a story on money laundering, the department coughed up the records,
but laid down some ground rules. It asked for a detailed statement of the
information sought and how it would be used. It demanded an agreement that
the computer programs for analyzing the information would not produce the
identities of individuals or businesses.

"In
the event that a search of the database results in the inadvertent disclosure
of personal identifiers," the Treasury regulations say, the user must "terminate
the search until appropriate security measures can be implemented; relinquish
all records of personal identifiers to Treasury officials; and make no
further disclosure of the information."5

Democratic
theory holds that the public's information ought to be available equally
to all members of the public. That is fairly easy
to do with paper records that anyone can walk in and inspect. But complicated
computer records take special equipment and special skill that are not
generally available to the ordinary citizen. The issue of who should pay
the cost of access has not been resolved. Some government agencies charge
special fees for the use or copying of computerized public records, and
these fees could easily be manipulated to create barriers to the freedom
of information.

The
problem is less severe when a reporter or inquisitive citizen wants a specific
piece of information and can describe it in some detail: a real estate
transaction, a birth certificate, or a list of campaign contributors, for
example. It is usually pretty clear that the government has a duty to provide
the information and pay the expenses of providing it or charge a nominal
copying fee. But should the government support a fishing expedition? Is
merging two databases and browsing through them to see what turns up an
activity that should be subject to the same rules of access? The Privacy
Act of 1974, one of the last projects of the late Senator Sam Ervin, puts
barriers in the way of government agencies that would like to swap and
match data. A Reagan administration proposal to move the Bureau of the
Census from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department was defeated
on the ground that the agency that controls income tax records should not
also keep census records. On the other hand, a resourceful journalist can
sometimes get government record keepers to provide active assistance in
matching records. The Milwaukee Journal, for example, asked the
Wisconsin Department of Transportation to match its computerized driving
records against a list of licensed pilots supplied by the Federal Aviation
Administration. The state officials obligingly supplied reporter James
Rowen with the names of 302 Wisconsin airplane pilots who had been convicted
of driving motor vehicles under the influence of alcohol. Seventeen of
them were licensed to fly passenger airliners.6

What
future barriers are erected against such searches may very well depend
on the self-imposed restraint of journalists who know how to deal with
computerized public records. Identifying drunks who fly airliners or drive
school buses serves a clear public purpose, and
few are likely to argue that the right of privacy of the pilots or bus
drivers overrides the welfare of the passengers they serve. But if journalists
use the computer to reveal embarrassing private facts just to show off
their technical virtuosity and without any clear public benefit, a regulatory
backlash could result. As a minimum, journalists should impose on themselves
the same moral standards and the same restraints that would be observed
for information gathered by other means. If we are to argue that an electronic
record has the same legal standing as a paper record, we should treat that
record with at least the same sensitivity.

Defining
public opinion

Precision
journalism is at its best when it is sorting out the conflicts among special
interest groups, measuring their support, estimating their potential for
having an effect. When it does this, it departs from the referendum model
of public opinion, whose only virtue is that it is easy to understand.

By
the referendum model I mean a view of public opinion that holds that policy
makers ought to be guided by whatever the majority thinks on any given
issue. In the referendum model, every citizen's vote counts exactly the
same. In the real world, that is not so, not even for those few issues
that are actually decided by referendums. Even in those cases decisions
are made by those who pay the cost --in
time and energy consumed -- of voting. Nothing in this country is decided
by a representative sample of the public.

Why,
then, do we go to so much trouble to acquire and interview a representative
sample of the public? Because it is there, perhaps. And because we are
intuitively comfortable with the fairness of the referendum, majority-decides
model. George Gallup, the pioneer American pollster, is also partly to
blame, because he promoted the habit of thinking of a poll as a continuous
referendum by which majority will could be made known.7

But
observers of American politics since Alexis de Tocqueville have known that
pure majority rule is neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. Tocqueville
worried that pure popular control would prevent the wisest and best from
using their gifts for the public good. He welcomed
the formation of interest groups as ways of concentrating the power of
minorities to create "a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the
majority."8

As
originally conceived during the social protest movements of the 1960s,
precision journalism was a way to expand the tool kit of the reporter to
make topics that were previously inaccessible, or only crudely accessible,
subject to journalistic scrutiny. It was especially useful in giving a
hearing to minority and dissident groups that were struggling for representation.

Representative
government in the United States has always involved tension among competing
factions, as James Madison, the fourth president and one of the authors
of the Constitution of 1787, had foreseen.9
But the referendum model is much too simple for the complexities of representative
government in a large and conflict-ridden society. The majority wants conflicting
things. The composition of the majority shifts from one issue to the next.10
Some voters feel so strongly about single issues that they will yield on
almost everything else to get their way on that one issue. Such trading
is called logrolling, and it takes place quite visibly among elected representatives,
but you can see its origins in the work of single-issue pressure groups.
Like most modern democracies, we are governed by temporary coalitions.
The process of forming those coalitions, always less formal and more difficult
to follow than in European parliamentary democracies, is worth following
but it demands a special kind of public opinion polling, including a recognition
that not all opinions are equal.

Elections

People
who vote are an interesting and deviant subset of the general population.
Except in national elections, they are usually a minority. Measuring their
attitudes and behavior is especially relevant and especially challenging.
This effort has been one of the most popular applications of precision
journalism.

For
many journalists, the effort to measure and even predict electoral
behavior has been motivated by simple competitiveness. The most interesting
fact about an election is who wins. If you can find out ahead of time,
it is news by definition. The Literary Digest demonstrated the news
value of election predictions in a series of surveys from 1916 through
1936. At just the moment that their technology failed, George Gallup demonstrated
that it could be perfected. He performed a polling hat trick. Not only
did he predict that Franklin Roosevelt would win the 1936 election in a
landslide, he also predicted that the Literary Digest poll would
show the opposite. He even had an accurate estimate of the percentage that
the Digest poll would give Alf Landon. (He did it by checking a
small sample from the same lists of telephone and automobile users that
the Digest used to recruit its two million respondents.) That established
Gallup's reputation and made polling credible. Since then the technology
has improved to the point where a national poll is considered a failure
if it misses the election outcome by more than two percentage points. In
the 1988 presidential election, none did.11

When
I was a Washington correspondent in the 1960s, poll watchers focused chiefly
on the two nationally syndicated newspaper polls, those of George Gallup
and of Louis Harris. Interviewers talked to citizens in person in their
homes, mailed the results to the home office, and the results of each poll
were analyzed and reported in leisurely fashion over the course of several
weeks.

Competition,
technology, and a faster-paced presidential selection process changed that.
In 1988 there were ten national polling organizations in the field and,
on the average, a new poll was reported every second day during the final
months of the campaign. Neither the public nor the press corps was accustomed
to this density of polling data. Because the presidential selection process
was itself in an era of change, some associated the undesirable and worrisome
aspects of change with the polls and began to blame the polls.

A
list of complaints

There
have been five basic complaints about election polls:

1.
There are too many polls. "Every newspaper and television station
thinks it has to have its own poll," complained columnist Jack Germond.
"So we keep quantifying the obvious."12
That, at least, is a self-limiting problem. Polls are produced in response
to a free-market demand for information. When they merely restate the obvious,
demand will decline.

2.
The polls are not accurate enough. This complaint is typically heard
in the early part of a presidential campaign when different polls published
within a few days of one another give seemingly different results. Surely,
it is assumed, they could not all be accurate.

Much
of this problem, if not all, is due to the fact that polling organizations
reserve their best and most expensive methodology for their later measurements,
the ones that will be compared to the election results to provide an evaluation
of the poll. Early polls leave more room for error for a variety of methodological
reasons, including smaller samples and less rigorous methods for identifying
likely voters. In a nation where only about half the voting-age population
participates in a presidential election, identifying those who will vote
is both important and difficult.

Differences
among polls are also exaggerated by the journalistic convention of reporting
the point spread between two candidates rather than the size of the leader's
majority. For example, the final Gallup poll in the 1988 presidential election
was reported as a twelve-point lead for George Bush while the final Harris
survey gave Bush a four-point lead. Surely, it seemed, one poll or both
had to be seriously in error. They were not. Gallup gave Bush 56 percent
of the two-party vote, and Harris gave him 52. Bush actually got 54 percent,
so both polls were accurate to two percentage points, well within normal
sampling error. The other national polls that reported in the week of the
election were even closer.

Another
complaint is related to the one of inaccuracy:

3.
The polls are often wrongly interpreted. This, too, seems to be
a self-solving problem. Twenty years ago, I wrote an article on misinterpretations
of polls by journalists for Columbia Journalism Review, and a rereading
shows that the media have made considerable progress in understanding and
interpreting election polls.13
Some common assumptions then, that a poll in one
city or county is generalizable to the entire nation, or that a poll in
August predicts voter decisions in November, are no longer so widely held.
Errors are still made today, but they are more subtle: for example, the
failure to distinguish between a poll of voting age adults and one of likely
voters. The proliferation of polls will, of course, force journalists to
become more proficient at interpreting them. The information marketplace
will demand it. But that will only aggravate the next complaint on the
list:

4.
Polls are too accurate. The logic behind this complaint is that
polls were relatively harmless when they were wrong much of the time, because
nobody took them seriously. But when they are right, the public believes
them and responds to them, and this possibly affects voting behavior. The
logic parallels that of seventeenth-century English libel law, where it
was held that the greater the truth in a defamatory statement, the greater
the tort.

This
complaint is related to the one that is probably discussed the most:

5.
The polls affect the outcome of the election. Until recently, the polling
fraternity tended to dismiss polling effects on the election process itself
as either nonexistent or negligible.14
As recently as 1980, Albert E. Gollin was able to write that such concerns
"have faded away for lack of supporting evidence."15
No more. As research has become more sophisticated, that position has become
difficult to sustain, particularly as researchers look at indirect effects
through political contributors, campaign volunteers, and endorsers.16
Early polls are a special problem. Such polls are name-recognition tests
rather than predictors of who will win. Unsophisticated consumers of polling
data do not always recognize this limitation, and that can make it difficult
for a little-known challenger to attract the backing needed to mount a
serious challenge against a well-known incumbent. Potential backers, mistaking
the name-recognition data for an election prediction, are frightened off.
That error contributed to the defeat of Hubert H. Humphrey by Richard M.
Nixon in 1968. Humphrey lagged in the early polls and failed to get the
financial backing that he needed to get an advance commitment of
late-campaign television time. Because that election was so close, a late
media push could have made the difference.

Campaign
contributors still make that kind of mistake. "A poll of 47 percent to
30 percent looks good for the incumbent and makes it hard for the challenger
to raise money," says USA Today pollster Gordon S. Black. "In truth,
we know from research that an incumbent with less than 50 percent of the
vote is in deep trouble. . . ."17
The democratic solution, of course, is not to curtail the polls but to
teach those who use them to make decisions to do so rationally.

Where
direct effects on voters are concerned, the effects are often so slight
as to lack statistical significance, but that does not mean they lack substantive
importance. In a close election, there is no such thing as a negligible
effect. The presidential elections of 1960 and 1968 could have been tipped
the other way by any number of normally inconsequential factors.

The
complaint of election effects begs the question of whether such effects
are good or bad for democracy. Even the pollsters trying to defend themselves
often start with the assumption that such effects are bad. But another
argument needs to be considered. In today's media-driven elections, the
information provided by polls ñ from
the primary polls to the early calls on election night may actually help
the process.

That
this sounds like a radical notion is a measure of how much we have forgotten
the roots of democratic theory.

The
sanctity of the ballot has an emotional, almost mystical, quality in the
United States, as though democracy were a religion rather than a practical
way of letting the people govern. We are a nation of immigrants, and for
those who came from nondemocratic or less democratic countries, the right
to vote symbolizes the difference between tyranny and popular control.
We tend to forget that the secret ballot is an import from Australia and
a fairly recent development in our history, and that its original purpose
was not to protect the privacy of the citizen but to make it more difficult
for corrupt politicians to bribe him. A citizen whose vote is unknown is
less likely to be paid for voting a certain way, because he has no way
of proving that he carried out his side of the contract. The earliest postcolonial
elections in the United States were carried out in full public view. In
Virginia, for example, the voter entered the courtroom, stood before the
sheriff, and announced his vote. The candidates were even present to thank
him personally in some cases. If not, their representatives were there
to record the vote.18

Voting
in the New England town meeting, the archetypal model of democracy in America,
was done in full public view. And voting on the record is standard practice
in legislative bodies. Tactical voting, where one withholds one's vote
until he or she sees how other members are voting and makes a decision
based on that information, is an accepted practice in legislative bodies,
and it makes perfect sense.

The
building of consensus

A
representative democracy in a large and complex nation faces the problem
of forming a working majority from many small and diverse segments of interests.
There are never enough resources for everyone to get everything he or she
wants. The problem of pulling together enough of the conflicting goals
to make the best and most coherent policy is one that has haunted philosophers
from the dawn of recorded human thought. Economists call it optimization.
Moral philosophers who worry about it are called utilitarians. Political
scientists call it consensus formation. In every field where the problem
is considered, information is crucial to a solution. This need for information
is especially important in politics, where the main tool of consensus formation
is coalition building. To build a coalition you have to know what each
group wants and how badly it wants it, i.e., what it will give up to get
it.

In
European parliamentary democracies the process of coalition building comes
mainly after the election as members of specialized parties representing
minorities of various sizes strike their bargains with one another to form
a government. In the United States, with its two-party, winner-take-all
system, the coalition building has to take place before the election. This
structural difference accounts at least in part for the
historically lighter voting participation in the United States than in
Europe. If the two major political parties have done their job properly,
the process of consensus formation will have brought them so close together
by election time that the voters will be relatively indifferent to the
final choice.

But
the major parties in America have not been doing that job as deftly as
in the past. The brokering that took place at national party nominating
conventions through a series of ballots edging ever closer to a working
majority was a fairly efficient method of coalition building. But the last
multiballot convention was in 1952 when the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson
on the third try. The flow of information through the mass media has become
so efficient that all the players know who has what bargaining chips and
what the outcome will be before they arrive in the convention city.

The
role of the media became even greater after the party reforms of 1970 took
power away from the party professionals and gave it to the rank and file.
This change was effected mainly through rules that encouraged the states
to select their delegates through primary elections. One effect of this
so-called reform was that candidate selection fell to nonprofessionals
who were more interested in promoting their narrow ideological goals than
in finding a candidate who could capture the broad center of the spectrum
where the likelihood of winning was greatest. George McGovern (who headed
the commission that wrote the new rules for the Democratic party) in 1972
and Ronald Reagan in 1980 were examples of the new noncentrist candidates.

Coalition
building was never as easy in the American system as it is in parliamentary
systems, and the weakening of the political parties has made it more difficult
still. And it places a heavy burden on the mass media of communication,
which must now provide rank-and-file voters with information that previously
only the party professionals needed. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that
giving the voters accurate information about each other, about the relative
voting strength and the preferences of different groups in the electorate,
might help, not hurt?

Tactical
voting

Take
the case of the early primaries, for example. Assume that you are a Republican
and your first choice is Pierre DuPont and your second choice is Bob Dole
and your least favored choice is George Bush. You need poll information
to make a rational choice. If the polls show that Bush is ahead, that Dole
has a chance of beating him, and DuPont is dead last in a field of six,
your vote will count the most if you go for your second choice, Dole. Why
should you not have the benefit of that information?

Here
is another kind of example. In 1980, the candidates were Ronald Reagan,
Jimmy Carter, and a dissident moderate, break-away Republican, John Anderson.
A centrist voter might prefer Carter as long as he seemed to have a chance
of winning. Given information that Carter would lose, this voter might
want to cast a ballot for Anderson to protest the capture of the Republican
party by the right-wing Reaganites.

Consider
yet another possibility. The American system works most efficiently when
the president and Congress are in the hands of the same party. A rational
voter who was aware of this fact, and considered it important, might reasonably
use polling information about the probable winner of the presidency to
decide how to vote for a congressional candidate.

Finally,
there is the matter of turnout. A voter can make rational use of information
about whether or not an election will be close to decide whether or not
the possibility of affecting the outcome is enough to justify the effort
to vote. Not everyone wants to be rational about this. My California cousins
express resentment when the networks tell them the election is over before
they have had a chance to vote. They say it makes them feel powerless.
I, on the other hand, think they should be grateful because they have more
information on which to act than do I, who must vote blindly from the east
coast. Some day, I tell them, there will be an election so close that Dan
Rather will look them in the eye and tell them that the outcome depends
on the voters on the western seaboard. My western cousins can then go charging
out of their hot tubs and proceed to the polls feeling powerful indeed.19

Can
polls really be used to provide tactical guidance to voters in this way,
or is this just empty theory? Let's look at the extreme case, early calls
by the networks on election night. The best opportunity for studying the
results comes in the extreme cases because they leave less room for subtlety.
The extreme case is an early call of a landslide in an election that was
expected to be close. And the best example is the 1980 election when President
Jimmy Carter was defending his office against challenger Ronald Reagan.
Using exit poll and sample precinct data, NBC announced shortly after 8
p.m. that Reagan had won. President Carter promptly conceded even though
polls in many states, from New York to California, were still open.

Among
the most thorough studies of the effects of that early call on voter behavior
were investigations by political scientists. John E. Jackson of the University
of Michigan20
used data from panel surveys, and Michael X. Delli Carpini of Rutgers University21
looked at aggregate voting data at the congressional district level. Both
found evidence that participation declined among voters potentially affected
by the knowledge that Carter had conceded. In other words, the response
was rational.

In
addition, Delli Carpini found intriguing evidence that the voters were
using the information rationally along the more subtle lines that I have
just mentioned. In districts where polls were open after NBC's call, there
was a decline in the Democratic vote and a 2 percent surge in the vote
for John Anderson. And there was nearly a 5-percent swing toward the Republican
candidates for Congress. Is there a measurable segment of voters really
sophisticated enough to cast a protest vote for Anderson when they know
that Carter will lose ñ or
to vote for a Republican congressman because they expect a Republican to
be in the White House? The Republican congressional boost, Delli Carpini
found, came from the districts with higher levels of income and education
ñ exactly from the people
that one would expect to make such calculations. Jackson's individual-level
data contained a consistent, though statistically insignificant, relationship:
Republicans were more likely to be deterred from voting by hearing about the
early call or Carter's concessions than were Democrats. Republicans tend
to be higher in socioeconomic status than Democrats.

This
rational use of polling data by voters will still be resented by politicians
who believe they are damaged by it. Candidates for state and local office
hoping for a coattail effect or a high turnout can justly say that the
effect is harmful to them. But these effects are situation-dependent. They
are not amenable to being turned into ideological issues. And complaints
beg the question of whether the harm is unjust. Nothing in democratic theory
says that elections should be decided by voters who care so little about
the outcome that they need some external motivation to get to the polls.

On
the whole, a case can be made that the rational use of information about
what other voters are doing or may do helps the democratic process. Voters
have always had this kind of information to act on. What is new is that
polling makes the information less often wrong. When the information is
surprising, as was the case in 1980 because the election was expected to
be close, the effect is more dramatic. But drama is not inherently evil.
And one surely cannot argue that democracy is served when voters are acting
on bad information, which would have been the case without NBC's early
call. Over the long run, there will be elections where the situation is
the reverse of 1980, elections that everyone expects to be landslides which
are in fact close ñ as
was the case in the Humphrey-Nixon election of 1968. If exit polls had
been in place then, turnout could have gotten a boost from voters motivated
by the knowledge that they had an extraordinary opportunity to make a difference.

This
rational-voter theory does not take care of all the problems. There may
still be voters who will use the information irrationally. But that's not
against the law in a democracy. No doubt there were voters who opposed
Michael Dukakis because of his Greek ancestry or who voted against George
Bush because he came from Texas. I have not heard anyone argue that information
about a candidate's origins should be suppressed because voters might use
it irrationally or unfairly. A democracy that tries to protect its voters
from information that they might use irrationally ceases to be a democracy.
The voting decision cannot be forced into a sterile, information-free environment,
nor should it be.22

Uneasiness
in the media

The
mass media organizations that sponsor the polls are uneasy in their new
role, but they have no choice except to fulfill it, just as the rank-and-file
voters must accept new and heavier responsibility. When the Miami Herald
reported the details of Gary Hart's sexual escapades, it was responding
to this new need. Voters were given a view of a candidate that in a previous
era would have been confined to the smoke-filled rooms where the power
brokers negotiated. Because the primary election system has shifted the
decision out of those rooms and placed it directly in the hands of the
voters, the media have a greatly increased duty to give those voters the
information with which to exercise that power.

The
"bandwagon effect" is a term that originally was applied to delegates in
a national nominating convention where the goal of a delegate was to get
on the winning side in time to make a difference and place the winner under
some obligation to the delegate. It is a useful phenomenon, helpful in
coalition building, and no less useful when the arena becomes the nation
at large instead of the convention hall. And yet the media persist in feeling
guilty about contributing to a bandwagon effect, even when the contribution
is in the form of accurate information.

This
guilt is especially intense where quantitative data are involved. The election
process demands information, and the media cannot and should not avoid
supplying information which has the potential to affect the outcome. But
when the information is about the voters themselves, a certain circularity
is introduced into the process that makes media people uneasy. The additional
fact that polling involves numbers gives it some special mystique, making
it seem more like a "pseudo-event" than would be the case if the investigation
had been initiated by a news medium using purely qualitative methods.23
Moreover, the use of numbers and scientific method
gives polling information more credibility than information from conventional
reporting modes. This enhanced credibility, paradoxically, increases the
cost to society when the information is wrong. And so, in what amounts
to intellectual self-mutilation, some organizations go out of their way
to cloak their numbers in ambiguity. They do this by ignoring pollsters'
attempts to produce a number that can be compared directly with the election
outcome (and thereby sacrificing the one direct test of the poll's validity)
and by clinging to undecided and leaning voters as if their existence denoted
a major uncertainty over the outcome.

When
the New York Times reported the final Gallup poll result in November
of 1988, for example, it deleted the Gallup Organization's basic prediction
of a Bush win with 56 percent of the two-party vote and reported only the
less refined numbers, suppressing Gallup's allocation of the undecided
portion.24
The Timesevidently did not think its readers were up to handling
that knowledge. USA Today used Gordon Black's straightforward prediction
of 55 percent for Bush in a page-one graphic display, but failed to mention
it in the accompanying story, which emphasized leaners and the undecided.25
The three network polls attempted no allocation of the undecided. Anyone
wanting to compare their polls to the election outcome had to do so after
the fact by dropping the undecided from the percentage base. And some newspapers
have even become leery of incorporating leaners into their final figures.
(Leaners, as you will recall from the previous chapter, are persons who
give a choice only when asked a follow-up question, e.g., "As of today,
which way are you leaning?") One explanation of this bizarre behavior is
that the media want to avoid the obvious validity test and leave the leaners
and undecided voters positioned as a cover for their polls' possible mistakes.
A more subtle explanation is also plausible: the complaints against polls
have made the media managers feel guilty about their own precision, and
so they seek to conceal that precision.

This
guilt may in turn be based on the violation of one of journalism's norms:
that the media should observe and report with detachment and not participate.
Publishing polls may seem too dangerously close
to participation. This stance bespeaks a certain ignorance of how democracy
works in the United States. Every decision on what to print and what not
to print is, after all, a form of participation.

Democracy
was never meant to operate in a sterile, information-free environment.
And yet one media pollster wrote in an article published just after the
November 1988 election that consensus formation is "the real danger in
media polling."26
This view is widely held, and it shows how poorly some of us Americans
appreciate the subtleties of our own system and the theory behind it. Consensus
formation is the aim of the election process. If precision journalism,
in the form of preelection and exit polls, helps the electorate to communicate
with itself and bring about consensus, then there is hope for the brave
new world of direct democracy that mass communication technology is trying
to bring us. Precision journalism is part of that technology.

If
precision journalism can wholeheartedly embrace the openness of scientific
method, its potential dangers and abuses will be self-correcting. A journalism
based on scientific method leaves a trail where error can be detected and
truth verified. Nowhere is that as true as in the case of election polls.
The public will trust polls as much as they deserve to be trusted, no more
and no less. The comparison of polls with election results is a wonderful
way for the public to judge, and journalists should not create barriers
to inhibit or cloud that judgment. If the accuracy of other forms of journalism
could be put to such a test, the marketplace of ideas would reward the
purveyors of truth relentlessly and efficiently. Journalists should welcome
the chance to be put to such a test.

10. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties
of the majoritarian model, see James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The
Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). return
to text

11. George Bush won the election with 54 percent
of the two-party vote. The percentages given him by the various polls (based
on decided voters in the network polls plus allocated undecided voters
in the rest) were: USA Today (Gordon Black) 55; CBS, 55; ABC, 55;
NBC, 53; Harris, 52; Gallup, 56. return
to text

21. Michael X. Delli Carpini, "Scooping the Voters?
The Consequences of the Networks’ Early Call of the 1980 Presidential Race,"
Journal of Politics, 7 (February/March 1984), 48-50. return
to text

22. For an excellent exposition of this argument
in a Spanish context, see Jose Ignacio Wert, "Uses and Misuses of Survey
Polls in the Media," paper presented at the IAMCR-WAPOR joint session on
Mass Media and Public Opinion, Barcelona, July 1988. return
to text

23. Identification of the poll as pseudo-event
was popularized by Daniel Boorstin in 1961 when both polls and their use
by news media were less sophisticated than they are today. For a useful
discussion of the concept, see Gollin, op. cit., p. 449. return
to text

24. "Bush and Dukakis Travel to West for Final Jousts
of Campaign," New York Times, November 7, 1988, p. B14. return
to text

25. USA Today, November 7, 1988, p. 1. The
editor who supervised production of the graphic and the editor who had
final review of the story had different views on what should be reported.
return
to text